


Places to Live

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:08:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29509470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Blair is giving a lecture
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11
Collections: SenThurs.freeze





	Places to Live

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentinel Thursday prompt 'freeze'

Places to Live

by Bluewolf

Blair stood, watching his 101 class, until his silence drove them to pay full attention. "There are still some tribes, all over the world, living a hunter-gatherer way of life, living as their ancestors did," Blair began, falling into his planned lecture with the ease of several years of practice. "There are also a lot of those tribes that have been forced away from hunting and gathering by the actions of their governments, who want to show the world that their countries are progressive, with nobody living a primitive life. Those people have been forced into a more 'civilized' lifestyle - which gives them a life of more hard work and less free time than they enjoyed in their hunter-gatherer days. Basically, a poorer standard of living.

"I don't deny that there was a sexual imbalance in a hunter-gatherer life - the men always had more leisure time than the women; but in a farming lifestyle there was still that imbalance. Because apart from the work that they all did, the women had the additional chore of cooking for the family as well as the care of the children. And often, though not always, it was the women who built the houses, too.

"The materials that the houses were built from varied a lot depending on what was available. In some areas it was cloth; the houses were essentially tents. In some areas it was still tents but the material used was animal skin. In some areas they made mud and wattle walls. I know, you'd expect the mud to soften and collapse in really wet conditions, but the mud was mixed with straw and that gave it some durability.

"In a few areas where there were caves they lived in the caves. Sometimes they 'built' caves by finding a 'cave' that was relatively high, but only a few feet deep, and building a wall of stone to close the open side. Anyone know of somewhere I could be referring to?"

After a moment of silence, a voice said, "Montezuma's Castle in Arizona?"

"Right.

"But in some ways the most imaginative form of 'house' was the igloo. The house built of big blocks of frozen snow that the Inuit constructed." Blair looked around the class. "And that's something I'd expect all of you to have encountered at some point in your reading. Eskimos - though they're called Inuit now - and igloos."

A hand went up.

"Yes, Mandy?"

"That was something I never quite understood," she said. "Didn't the igloos melt?"

"Yes," Blair said. "Igloos were never really meant to be permanent homes. When the men were out hunting, they were often far enough from the huts that were their permanent homes that it wasn't practical for them to travel each day. The only 'building' material available to them was ice. So they built the igloos as temporary shelters. One would last perhaps three, four days before it began to melt."

"But even if it began to melt, wouldn't it be freezing in there, surrounded by all that ice?" another voice asked.

"Cold, yes," Blair agreed, mentally congratulating himself. He had them! "The men wouldn't dream of taking their clothes off while they were in an igloo - ever. But they were out of the wind, sheltered from any fresh fall of snow. Those two factors alone are lifesavers."

"Is that why mountaineers here say that if they're benighted it's best to dig a snowhole to stay in overnight?" another of the students put in.

"Yes - and where did they get the idea from?"

"The Eskimo igloo?"

"Inuit. Where else?"

"But... but why do books often give the idea that the Eskimos lived all the time in igloos?" someone else put in.

"Doesn't it sound dramatic? These tribes living in the far north, surrounded by snow and ice all year, using the only resources available to them?" Blair gave a wry grin. "Anthropologists writing a book for the general public often distort the facts; exaggerate things; take something that happened to one of the tribe they're visiting and slant it so that it happened to them. The facts are there; they are true facts - they're just made to sound more... well, dramatic. But the Inuit don't live on permanent ice sheets; in the spring the snow melts, trees - all right, small trees - grow. They can harvest wood to make huts.

"A thousand years ago the world was warmer than it is now. The Vikings had a settlement on Greenland; but by 1500 it had gone. It's been postulated that either everyone had died or they'd moved to live with the local Inuit, and were absorbed into the tribe - but that's just speculation. It's equally possible that the young were unhappy with the way of life and moved back to Europe. We simply don't know. What we do know is that the planet had moved into a mini ice age. We're still coming out of it - though things have been speeded up by climate change."

Blair looked around the class. "Right. I want you to take out your notebooks and begin to list possible reasons why, when the climate started to get colder, the Inuit didn't gather their goods together and move further south; why they found ways to adapt to the freezing winters. And also possible reasons why the Viking colony on Greenland - which obviously got its name because the land was green - failed. I've mentioned one or two possibilities, but there are more." He glanced at his watch. "You have just over half an hour."

It was time for the students to learn that there were always plenty of possibilities for why things happened, while there often was nothing positively known about why. He would, he decided, use the next lesson to discuss their speculations.

Keeping an eye on them, he began to think about the latest case Jim was investigating - just a little amused to realize that he had begun to consider police work more interesting than the anthropology he had studied since he was sixteen


End file.
